Brevity in Early Medieval Letters

Abstract

A medieval truism holds that a letter must be short. The Benedictine monk Alberic of Monte Cassino, writing in the late eleventh century, advised letter writers that the central portion of the letter, the narratio, "will be quite good if it is short and clear." Much earlier, in the fourth century, Julius Victor had offered much the same recommendation. An official letter, he wrote, should attempt a terse mode of expression and restricted oratory. In private letters, however, brevity was even more important: